How much do you know about the Super Bowl?

As you and most of the world seem to know, Super Bowl LX is on February 9. But let’s see how much you know about the game itself:

• Which US president was the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl? (Donald Trump)
• What position has won the most Super Bowl MVP awards? (quarterback)
• Which team completed the only perfect season in Super Bowl history? (the Miami Dolphins, in 1972)
• What unexpected event delayed the Super Bowl in 2013 for more than thirty minutes? (a power outage)
• Which team won the most Super Bowls in a row? (it’s a trick question: eight teams have won back-to-back, though the Pittsburgh Steelers are the only team to do so twice)
• Which team lost four Super Bowls in a row? (the Buffalo Bills).

Now let’s ask: How much do you know about the history of the game?

Who was Pudge Hefflefinger?

The American Football League was started in 1960 by businessmen who were unable to secure NFL franchises. In 1966, the leagues merged and began a game in which their champions would play each other. Lamar Hunt, owner of the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs, suggested calling the game the “Super Bowl.”

Ironically, the first Super Bowl did not sell out, but the game drew sixty-five million television viewers, the largest ever for an American sporting event at the time. When Apple commissioned a Ridley Scott-directed commercial promoting their new Macintosh computer for the 1984 game, the ad started a sensation. From that point forward, corporate America has debuted its best ads during the Super Bowl.

What about the history of football itself?

In ancient Greece, men played a sport called Episkyros in which they tried to throw a ball over a scrimmage while avoiding tackles. Since antiquity, forms of what we call football have been played; some used an inflated pig’s bladder. Organized versions of the game began to take shape in English public schools in the nineteenth century.

American colleges picked up the game, with Princeton students playing something called “ballown” as early as 1820. Most were “mob” style games, with huge numbers of players attempting to advance the ball into a goal area, often by any means necessary.

In 1869, Rutgers and Princeton played a game widely considered to be similar to football as it is known today. Walter Camp was captain of the Yale University football team and is known as the “Father of American Football.” His rules, adopted in 1880, revolutionized the game; the Walter Camp Football Foundation continues to select All-American teams in his honor.

Professional football began in 1892 when a team in Pennsylvania hired former Yale All-American guard Pudge Heffelfinger. The first wholly professional game was played in 1895; the American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920 and eventually became the National Football League.

Why I wrote this article

Now to my point: I did not know any of what I wrote in the last section until I learned what I wrote. Here’s why: None of what I just wrote is relevant to my life in any practical way. I therefore had no need to know it until I needed the information in order to write this article. I have not made a similar study of the history of basketball, baseball, or any other sport, since I have no plans to write similar articles about them.

What is true of sports is true of the rest of life: We seldom, if ever, learn and retain information that has no practical impact on our lives. 

For example, over the years, I learned some conversational Spanish that would help me be more effective when I went to Cuba on mission trips. Since I stopped going to Cuba, I have lost what little of the language I knew. I have not continued practicing Spanish because I have no practical reason to do so.

The same holds true even for Scripture. The Bible is emphatically the word of God, “breathed out by God” (2 Timothy 3:16) as its authors were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). But even its authoritative words were inspired as a means to an end: “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

The psalmist testified, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). When we learn and even memorize Scripture, the Spirit who inspired its words then uses them to equip and empower us to know Christ and to make him known (cf. John 14:26). The purpose of God’s word is to lead us to salvation in God’s Son and to advance God’s kingdom to God’s glory.

How Satan wants you to read the Bible

Now, Satan hates everything you just read. He adamantly does not want you near the Bible, because he knows what Dwight Moody said about Scripture: “This book will keep you from your sins, or your sins will keep you from this book.”

But if you insist on reading the Bible, the Enemy will then seek to make such study an end rather than a means. He wants to turn time in God’s word into a routine and a ritual, something we do for the sake of doing it.

He also wants us to do so in a transactional spirit by which we do what God wants so that God will do what we want. Just as the ancient Greeks and Romans sacrificed to the gods to get something from them, Satan wants us to pray, read Scripture, and worship as a business person making an investment to receive a return.

Your Father wants just the opposite. He wants us to see the Bible as “God preaching,” as JI Packer noted, and as “love letters from home,” as St. Augustine suggested. He wants us to listen for God’s voice in his word, praying for his Spirit to speak to us as we study its truths. And he wants to use these truths to change our lives and draw us into the “abundant” life he intends for us (John 10:10).

Four steps to meeting God in his word

The process I have taught to seminary students and church members over the decades is this:

1. Grammatical: what do the words say and mean?
2. Historical: how does the context, culture, and historical setting help us understand the text?
3. Theological: what does the intended meaning of the text teach us about God, ourselves, and other theological subjects?
4. Practical: how can we apply this intended meaning to our lives today?

I follow this model every day in my personal Bible study and public ministry. I urge you to do the same, remembering that you are not finished with God’s word until it has changed your life in some practical way. If there is not something you will do or stop doing, some way your life will be different as a consequence of meeting the God of the universe in his holy word, you have not truly experienced him.

How could it be otherwise?

A man once boasted to his pastor that he had been “through” the Bible twice that year. His wise minister replied, “That’s wonderful, but how many times has the Bible been ‘through’ you?”

How would you answer his question today?